Making a new Money gallery at the British Museum

Catherine Eagleton, British Museum

Chinese Ming banknote, AD 1375

The Money gallery at the British Museum opened 14 years ago, and was at the time a new way of displaying coins and medals. It represented a new way of thinking about the history of money, and changed the way museums around the world told this global story.

Now, a new partnership between Citi and the British Museum means we are able to redisplay the gallery, make changes to the design and content of the displays, and take advantage of new knowledge and new ideas in museology and monetary history.

We will be building on the results of an evaluation of the current Money gallery that has been done over the past few years. This gives us some clear pointers for how it can be clarified and updated, and we have already started a programme of consultation with key audiences to find out what they would like to see the new gallery containing, and what questions they have about money and its history.

Penny defaced by suffragettes, AD 1903. Crown copyright

The gallery will use money as a lens through which to look at the history of the world, as well as showing the different forms and functions money has taken and had around the world in the last 3,000 years or so. The challenge for me as the lead curator on the project is to work out how to edit a complex global story down so that it can be told in a single room. But here I am lucky to be able to draw on the expertise of my subject-specialist colleagues.

Gold coin of Abd al-Malik, probably made in Syria, AH 77 / AD 696-7

Throughout the coming year, members of the project team will be tracking the progress of this exciting project, here on the blog, right up to the opening in June 2012.

I’ll post something about once a month and, in between, there will be contributions from other people on how the project looks from their point of view.

We will be writing about (among other things) evaluation, object selection, text writing, design, conservation, and the tricky business of how you remove thousands of small objects from display and keep track of where they all are while the gallery works are in progress in the first few months of 2012.

The Money Gallery project is supported by Citi and opens in June 2012.